The second portion was DOOM going back to Georgia and recording stuff and sending it our way. After 2000, he stopped going into studios and working with rappers. For the most part, he didn’t work like that. This was the one time that I was aware of, when Madlib was in the same physical space as his collaborator.
They were all done in our house between Chris’s bedroom, where he had a microphone, and Madlib’s Bomb Shelter studio. DOOM’s lawyer ended up framing that thing, whatever it was, and told me, “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”Ī lot of the first portions were very simple. You cannot just write the name of the project on a check and have that be anything other than a check given to a person. My main thought during that whole experience was, “Do whatever you need to do to get an album to happen.” I knew, even at that point, that an EP wasn’t going to be what this collaboration needed.Ĭhris wrote some crazy 24 Hour Party People-type contract on the back of a paper plate or something like that. Miranda came up to my bedroom, which was also my office, and negotiated the terms of how they would collaborate together and how the money would be paid out. I remember him being in the basement, listening to music with Madlib and Chris. It wasn’t like he was telling me, “You can’t take a photo.” He would just put his hand up in front of his face and I was very respectful of that, of course. We were all just very chummy trying to figure things out. I remember when DOOM came in, because he didn’t look like the guy from KMD. There was a literal bomb shelter in the house we all lived in and that’s where Madlib’s studio went.
It’s going to have to be a minimum of $1,500 and flights and hotels. It was just bare bones not sure what might happen, but if it does happen, maybe it’ll be an EP. When I was negotiating with DOOM to have him come out to L.A., it was super simple. “We would sit there looking at his lyrics and the way that he thought about how he was going to choose one word over another.” But he really liked Quasimoto and Yesterday’s New Quintet and he couldn’t believe it was all the same guy doing it. DOOM had never heard of Stones Throw or Madlib. I had a friend who lived in the same part of Georgia as DOOM and I called him and said, “Would you bring a request to DOOM like, does he know who Madlib is? Does he know what Stones Throw is? Would he consider collaborating with Madlib? Just deliver him some records?” He brought Madlib’s records to DOOM’s house and just made the pitch and DOOM gave me a shout. We were all living together at the time and I had to bring Madlib down to the Long Beach Aquarium for an interview, where he told a journalist that he wanted to work with DOOM and J Dilla. But when DOOM popped up again with those Fondle ‘Em records like “Hey!,” my mind was blown.įast forward a couple of years and I moved to Los Angeles and I’m running Stones Throw and working very closely with Madlib. When Subroc died and KMD disappeared, none of us really thought too much about it just like a casualty of that era of the music business. Even as a child, I remember being heartbroken when I read that Subroc had been killed. Obviously, I’m a huge 3rd Bass fan I loved everything that they did collectively and as solo artists. Egon, who now runs the labels Now-Again Records and Madlib Invazion, spoke to Rolling Stone about the brilliant, but complicated, personality of DOOM, his innate creativity, and that time he officiated Egon’s entire wedding ceremony, in a mask, unscripted. “We didn’t think anybody was going to care about them.” “When we were making these songs, we thought we were making them for ourselves,” Alapatt, who met Dumile in 2002 as the general manager and A&R for Stones Throw Records, says. Rolling Stone called the album “one of underground hip-hop’s greatest moments” when placing it on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Madvillainy was the only album DOOM and Madlib worked on together a heady amalgam of leftfield, blunt-inspired beats and insanely intricate wordplay and concepts that remains, 17 years later, some of the best work either musician has ever recorded.
“It wasn’t until I saw Madlib’s text that I was like, I can’t believe this shit.” “My phone just exploded and I started going through it and I was like, ‘What in the fuck is going on?’,” Alapatt tells Rolling Stone. Dumile’s death set off shock waves in the music community but for Alapatt, who put together one of Dumile’s most celebrated and critically acclaimed projects - the 2004 collaboration with beloved, equally elusive hip-hop producer Madlib known as Madvillain - the loss was personal. Eothen “Egon” Alapatt was out on a bike ride in Big Sur, California on New Year’s Eve when the news broke that Daniel Dumile, the rapper who performed as MF DOOM, had died two months earlier.